Chatter

QUINN-TESSENTIAL BRADY:
MTV personality MARTHA QUINN is expanding her horizons—and hairdo. She'll be playing the wife of Bobby Brady [MIKE LOOKINLAND] on the new, updated CBS TV series, The Bradys, which, besides Lookinland, will feature many of the old cast members when it starts next month. "The weird thing is that Bobby was my favorite Brady," says Quinn. "Guys fantasize about sex, but girls fantasize about getting married—and Bobby was definitely the one for me at the time." Of her new character, she adds, "There's a little Brady in all of us, isn't there? There's that bit that wants to be part of the societal norm. When you go through the Brady machine and don the long Brady skirt and Mary Tyler Moore-meets-Patty Duke hairstyle, it's kind of cool. You think, 'This is what I would look like if I grew up with parents who stayed married.' "

LEAN ON ME:
Director STEVEN SPIELBERG, most of whose films are sustained by budgets totaling scores of millions of dollars, hopes later this year to make a considerably leaner film about his own childhood, based on a script written by his Sister, ANNE SPIELBERG, who co-wrote Big. "It's going to be like a $5 million film," says Spielberg, whose latest movie is the romance Always. "I realized when Annie wrote the script that there was no [big budget] production value in my childhood, none whatsoever. Annie just wrote a small, wonderful story about the two of us and my mother. It's very funny. We're shooting the whole thing in Cincinnati, where it takes place. It's basically based on experiences we had, friends of ours. It's more a comedy than an intimate portrait of our growing up."

OH, BROTHER:
Like his younger brother, NBC Today show anchor BRYANT GUMBEL, CBS's GREG GUMBEL is an early riser. Greg, formerly of the MSG cable network, recently joined the revamped CBS This Morning show as a sports reporter. "I'm sure there'll be people in the morning hitting their TV sets and saying 'I thought I changed this damned channel!' " says Greg. "There was a guy who wrote me a letter who must have had some real good Scotch before he wrote it. It was addressed to me but it read, 'Dear Bryant: Enjoyed your work in the college basketball studio [which Greg does]. Sorry to see you're losing Jane.' There are people who cannot or will not see the difference."

WHERE'S THE BEEFEATER?
Rock impresario MALCOLM McLAREN, whose Sex Pistols (with JOHNNY ROTTEN, né LYDON) triggered punk rock in the mid-'70s, says the passé movement has found a dainty resting place in the bosom of British nostalgia. "Punk has become one of England's greatest tourist attractions," says McLaren, who now makes his own albums, including the new Waltz Darling. "If you look in souvenir shops, alongside postcards of the royal family will be ones of the token punk rocker with his green hair and 'Anarchy in the U.K.' buttons. They've become as important as the Beefeater." And what of his ongoing feud with Lydon, now singing with Public Image Ltd.? "I hope we never reconcile," says McLaren. "I adore the fact that he hates me. He calls me the evilest man in the world—I must be doing something right."

BABY TALK:
Talk show hostess KATHIE LEE GIFFORD, 36, who's due to have a baby boy in March, says that she and her sportscaster husband, FRANK GIFFORD, 59, had hoped for a girl. (Frank already has three grown children, two boys and one girl, from an earlier marriage.) But, adds the co-host of the syndicated Live with Regis & Kathie Lee, "After we found out it was a boy, I was a little disappointed, but I remember Frank saying to me one night, 'Honey, maybe it's better that it's a boy, because he 'II be here to take care of you when I'm gone. 'And that really devastated me, because I don't like to think of my husband as ever being gone. He's unbelievably fit and robust, so I never think of him as growing older to the point that he'll someday probably pass away before I do. But that's the way he thinks. 'She 'II have a son who 'II take care of her.' It really represents the kind of human being I'm married to."